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Pol Pot

News about Pol Pot, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Updated Feb. 17, 2009

The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998. From 1975 through 1979, he reigned in a rule of terror that led to the deaths, by the most widely accepted estimates, of nearly a quarter of Cambodia's seven million people, through execution, torture, starvation and disease.

For nearly 19 years, after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion, Pol Pot remained in command of a guerrilla insurgency in the jungles of western and northern Cambodia.

His death came as government soldiers and renegade guerrillas from his Khmer Rouge movement were closing in on him and as the international community was preparing for his capture and trial for crimes against humanity.

Pol Pot and his inner circle of revolutionaries adopted a Communism based on Maoism and Stalinism, then carried it to extremes: They and their Khmer Rouge movement tore apart Cambodia in an attempt to "purify" the country's agrarian society and turn people into revolutionary worker-peasants.

Beginning on the day in 1975 when his guerrilla army marched silently into the capital, Phnom Penh, Pol Pot emptied the cities, pulled families apart, abolished religion and closed schools. Everyone was ordered to work, even children. The Khmer Rouge outlawed money and closed all markets. Doctors were killed, as were most people with skills and education that threatened the regime.

The Khmer Rouge especially persecuted members of minority ethnic groups -- the Chinese, Muslim Chams, Vietnamese and Thais who had lived for generations in the country, and any other foreigners -- in an attempt to create a "pure" Cambodia. Non-Cambodians were forbidden to speak their native languages or to exhibit any "foreign" traits. The pogrom against the Cham minority was the most devastating, killing more than half of that community.

Though Pol Pot was responsible for an untold number of deaths, he did not face charges until July 1997, when some of his former Khmer Rouge followers turned on him, denounced him for crimes against humanity in a carefully scripted show trial and put him under house arrest for life.

But Pol Pot, while acknowledging that "our movement made mistakes," insisted that he had ordered killings in self-defense, to save Cambodia from its Vietnamese enemies, and that the numbers of dead were wildly exaggerated.

Until the approach of internationally supervised elections in 1992, the Khmer Rouge occupied Cambodia's seat at the United Nations and took the leading role in agencies like Unesco.